Fresh Spot by fresh.fund - Recent Investments & Other Exciting news!
Fresh Spot - thoughts from fresh.fund
Welcome to Fresh Spot - a quarterly newsletter by fresh.fund!
You can also check out our recent updates and other opportunities on Linkedin & Facebook.
To start, these have been crazy times! We are happy to say that despite the global “balagan”, we have made three exciting new investments. Take a look 👀
🤑 Recent Investments:
Remilk - We often forget how essential milk has become in our daily lives but in 2016 annual milk consumption worldwide exceeded 200 billion liters! That’s a lot of milk! 😱 The problem is that traditional dairy production has been shown to contribute to climate change due to increased gas emissions from dairy cows. This is where Remilk comes in. Aviv & Ori are creating cost-effective dairy products without using a single cow or compromising on deliciousness. 😉
SMT Labs - What is the deadliest animal to humans on the planet? Lions? Tigers? Bears? The answer is… Mosquitoes! These pesky insects are responsible for more than 800,000 deaths a year according to the WHO. Ariel, Elly & Vic from SMT Labs are tackling this problem by developing technology that can drastically cut the costs of SIT – a natural and highly efficient insect birth control method, enabling a widespread solution to the global mosquito pandemic.
Deltika - Do you know how many regulatory hurdles banks face on a regular basis? 😔Yitzchak, Roei & Aryeh from Deltika sure do. That’s why they decided to build a product that helps financial institutions reduce the opacity of AI BlackBox risk assessment models so they can better serve their customers and avoid biases. We might add that Deltika is a portfolio company of our partners Cactus Capital at Ben Gurion University and that this investment is an exciting culmination of our strategic partnership. Onwards and upwards!
😇 Portfolio Highlights
Wisio raised a round from Bseed Ventures and revamped their website.
Deltika got into Techstars TLV and began their first pilot with a large European Bank.
SMT Labs got into IndieBio in NYC and is launching a new pilot to reduce the number of mosquitos at a luxury resort island in the Maldives. Once the borders open we may have to hop on a flight and check it out..
Visitt is continuting to sign new clients in Israel and in the US as property owners transition towards remote facility management.
PayEm is growing its customer base having onboarded 10 new clients in the last quarter including Intellogo.ai, Momentum Accounting, Finview Citizens Council, and our very own portfolio company, Visitt.io.
🎓 University Partnerships
Our Joint Venture with HIL Fund at the Univesity of Haifa was officially launched 👏🏻 gaining both local and international press. Take a closer look: JPost, Geektime & Kolbo-Haifa. Together with our new partners at the University of Haifa’s Innovation Labs, we held a startup pitch tournament. Check out the three finalists — Save the Bees, Applicodrama, & Edge-up here.
HIL Fund call for applications is closing today! If you are a student at the University of Haifa University or a recent graduate developing an idea or a startup, this is your last chance to apply here for funding.
We are happy to announce our newest partnership with Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, where we will join ACT Shenkar to offer students our fresh.ed course on entrepreneurship from the perspective of an investor.
>> Were also excited to announce the opening of their accelerator program.
Apply here.BGU's fresh.ed 2020. This month we completed the second fresh.ed course cohort at Ben Gurion University, as part of our partnership with Cactus Capital. We had the opportunity to meet some of the most talented students on campus and a select few will go on to become Cactus Capital's student analysts.
In Cactus Capital investment news, analysts submitted 10 companies to the fund's 3rd Investment committee where fresh.fund holds a seat. Each company presented their pitch and though final decisions have yet to be published, we were very impressed by the innovative ideas and strong teams.We are thrilled to participate, for the second year in a row, in the Collar Ignite Startup Competition at Tel Aviv University. Last year we invested in Contextual Web a startup we “discovered” through this partnership…
This week we participated in the finals and we are excited that our newest portfolio company, Remilk, won the Foodtech challenge and will be receiving $100,000 in investment from Jeremy Coller 😮
💭 Some of our thoughts & news
Congrats to our friends and anchor investors PICO Partners who had a great month with 2 exits announced in one week — Spot was sold for $450MM, and Vroom is now trading on Nasdaq at a whopping $5B market cap. Pico Partners clearly knows a thing or two about selecting winners! 💪😅
The fresh.fund Facebook group is back up & running!
With some rebranding, the group now has a name - “Fundable Founders - Startup funding + VC’s”.
The purpose of the group is to share knowledge and create discussion around the subject of VC’s and early stage startup funding in Israel. We would love to share your articles, content, ideas & questions in the group. Join the group HERE - and invite your friends! If you have any questions feel free to email michal@fresh.fund
🚪Don’t miss…
We came across this initiative, Mitchashvim — an organization that helps collect computers & laptops for underprivileged kids living in the periphery.
Click here to read more.An interesting read for the week by our friend Itay Sagie at VCforU.
What do early-stage investors really care about?! Read up on his thoughts here
Fresh Spot is from the home of fresh.fund and is by Zaki Djemal and Michal Ner-David. Zaki is the founder and Managing Partner at fresh.fund and Michal is anything community and partnerships.